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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29746020">Guns Of Navarone Ship Manifesto</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenleaf_starbright/pseuds/greenleaf_starbright'>greenleaf_starbright</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Guns of Navarone (1961)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/F, F/M, Fandom 101, M/M, Meta, Ship Manifesto, non-fiction</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 22:00:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,537</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29746020</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenleaf_starbright/pseuds/greenleaf_starbright</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Classic Saturday afternoon men-on-a-mission WW2 classic The Guns of Navarone (1961) is a love story. Let me tell you why. </p><p>The coded homoerotic passion of cigarette-sharing; what to do when your boyfriend "accidentally" gets your wife killed; Local Man Doesn’t Think Before Inviting All His Exes On The Same Beach Holiday; internationalist socialist pacifist bear 4 murder twink; and a questionable choice of navy shorts.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Andrea Stavros/Maria Pappadimos, Anna/Maria Pappadimos, John Anthony "Dusty" Miller/Roy Franklin, Keith Mallory/Andrea Stavros, Keith Mallory/John Anthony "Dusty" Miller, Keith Mallory/Roy Franklin, Spyros Pappadimos/Butcher Brown</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Guns Of Navarone Ship Manifesto</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Soft spoilers for the film throughout!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I have the immense misfortune to only ever really have been struck by the urge to ship and write fic and fan ardently - but once. And, alas, for the tiniest of microfandoms for a 60 year old film. So, like a cigarette passed yearningly from my lips to yours, I pass the beacon on to you, my dear reader, in the hope that you will one day join us on Navarone, and fill the fandom tag.</p><h2>Miller/Franklin – 10/10</h2><p>Canon. It’s really hard to imagine what the cast and crew thought they were doing, if they weren’t writing a love story. This was not what I expected to find when I first watched this film, but it single-handedly makes me understand why people ship, and I’ve never experienced anything like it again. I’d really like to participate more in fandoms which have other people in them; but this is my high watermark and it is, in every sense, what is meant by the term OTP.</p><p>It’s hard to say much about this ship because we see so little of it; at the same time it is the literal plot of the film, the still center around which everything else turns. If you would like a fuller ship manifesto, there’s a 2hr video about it and it’s called The Guns of Navarone (1961)</p><p>So canon that the director and Gregory Peck are both on record describing the film as a love story. Why the world is sleeping on this lost queer classic I do not understand.</p>
<p></p><div><h2>Stavros/Mallory – 9/10</h2><p>Trash fire angst ship. The can’t live with each other, can’t live without each other, moving as one like a well-oiled machine, so intimate as to be telepathic, ecstasy of love-and-death disaster. The “I have sworn to kill you when the war is over” ship. The “in an act of Freudian displacement, I have accidentally killed your wife” ship. The “so widely known to be fucking that HQ sends him straight to your hotel room, but you’re such an effective pair that we turn a blind eye to it” ship.</p><p>I struggle to see this as a happy ship, and perhaps that’s my failing. There’s a reason why the film is centered on breaking up this relationship and getting both halves into a healthier pairing. This clearly runs on cold-dark-nights-on-stakeout lust and mutual admiration for the others’ tactical brilliance.  They’ve both gone off the deep end with war, and maybe need Maria and Miller respectively to pull them back towards humanity. They cannot lie to one another, but then again, they do not need to.</p><p>Still, given MacLean’s fondness for “with one motion, everyone in the squad knew exactly what to do, responding perfectly in time to dispatch the whole unit of unsuspecting enemies with grim efficiency” descriptions, can you imagine the pornography?</p>
<p></p><div><h2>Stavros/Maria - 8/10</h2><p>i.e. the ship for bisexuals whose primary orientation is killing Nazis. Love-at-first-sight relationship of few words and deep feeling, and honestly? I love it. Both are taciturn Greek underground fighters who, perhaps more than any other characters, know what it is to live under occupation, and what must be done to resist it. Maria is the only person to make Stavros smile on screen – she’s straight-talking where Mallory is duplicitous, and they have a shared grief for Greece as an actual place, not a war prop. I see this as probably the most healing relationship in the film, and like they have a future as a legendary antifascist power couple.</p><p>&amp; I think it’s also significant in terms of Stavros’ character arc that he ends the film with someone who wants to go back to Navarone to rebuild its destroyed cities and protect civilians from the vengeance of its occupiers, rather than just killing and killing for its own sake.</p>
<p></p><div><h2>Anna/Maria – 7/10</h2><p>Resistance babes. Resistance leader Maria is maternal, protective, trying to live up to the shadow of her father, and wears her heart on her sleeve. Anna’s orientation is trauma, shaped by her time in captivty, unable to speak, and refusing to show her bare skin where she is scarred. There is so much you can do with the limited setup we have; from the way their relationship changes pre- and post- captivity, to the challenge of writing survivor sex (or non-sexual romantic intimacy) in a way that’s compelling and non-cliche, to adventures in spying, distributing aid, and blowing up bridges.</p>
<p></p><div><h2>Anna/Mallory – 2/10</h2><p>Canon. There’s more chemistry between Miller and his comedy explosive rat prop. Please, somebody stop the heterosexuals making films.</p>
<p></p><div><h2>Mallory/Franklin - 6/10</h2><p>Clearly exes on good terms who had a casual, chill, pre-war relationship. Franklin doesn’t see anything incongruous about inviting his boyfriend, his ex, and his ex’s lover on the same suicide mission behind enemy lines, which should tell you everything about his “nothing ever goes terribly wrong for me” attitude to life, and his overbearing confidence in expecting everyone else to fall in line around his plans.</p><p>Is this compelling enough to actually ship? I think the reading works, but I’m mostly interested in it as an illumination of other relationships. For one thing, Miller takes against Mallory immediately. For another, it’s most of Franklin’s screentime. I read Franklin as the definition of “historic gay people had full, happy, self-confident lives, actually” self-assurance. Perhaps the thing that isn’t working about Franklin/Miller – the thing that needs this relationship to be “broken up” – is Franklin’s chill, possibly poly, but certainly casual and expansive attitude to dating in contrast to Miller’s single-minded, high-intensity, ready to commit a court-martial offense for his beloved.</p><p>Who thought it was a good idea to invite the whole polycule along, Franklin?</p>
<p></p><div><h2>Jensen/Sidney– 5/10</h2><p>Look I know I shouldn’t, but there’s something in the weirdly intense uncut shots of the glassy eyed young man just standing in silence - I think it’s just odd editing, but I am serious about shipping this film in a way I have never been about anything else, so I’m gonna include it, because I am a completionist.</p>
<p></p><div><h2>Mallory/Miller – 7/10</h2><p>If there were ever a real Navarone fandom, this feels like the most-attractive-white-men-protagonists ship which would take up all the room. This ship is implied post-canon and to me, feels like it needs the most work.</p><p>After all, central to the film’s focus is on how they are different. Miller is doing his best to remain uninvolved, while Mallory has discovered he has an uncomfortable genius for military black ops. Miller doesn’t want to kill anybody; Mallory has lost his scruples some time ago. Miller sees war operations as meaningless beside the survival of loved ones; Mallory is institutionalised, wedded to the job.</p><p>I don’t feel a lot of enthusiasm for it, and additionally, I don’t think they have a lot of chemistry as performers. But I can see all the elements which would make a compelling ship. Reconciling this relationship is what canon is about; Navarone has a classic romance structure, in which two relationships which are not working (Mallory/Stavros and Miller/Franklin) are ended, in favour of ones which are good (Maria/Stavros and Mallory/Miller).</p><p>That implies the way that these characters challenge one another is far more nourishing for both of them than where they were before. After all, Miller’s non-participation is not a virtue when you’re surrounded by literal Nazis; and Mallory clearly needs the ethical pushback on his choices that Miller provides, and starts asking himself questions about just war he has not considered in some time. There’s a post-canon tension in their relationship as to which of their voices will prevail.</p><p>I can 100% see how this would be somebody’s jam, and one purpose of fandom is to find out how and make it work. So, I’m cool with it, and I think it’s one where good fanon would make me a lot more excited.</p>
<p></p><div><h2>Hauptmann Schessler/anyone – 0/10</h2><p>The great thing about a fandom of one is that I don’t even need to pay lip service to “what if we spent more time on a minor white dude who’s also a member of the SS than any single pairing containing a brown person” shipping.</p>
<p></p><div><h2>Brown/Pappadimos – 7/10</h2><p>Classic “pair the spares” for people who prefer their ships to never interact in canon. Guilt stricken socialist bear/murder twink. Both Brown and Pappadimos’ role in the team is to kill people. Pappadimos is young, bloodthirsty, was sent to New York by his parents but got “the wrong kind of education”. Violence? Sucking cock? We’re not told. Meanwhile, Brown has been fighting since 1937 in the Spanish Civil War – a genius with a knife who is tired, who smells the men he has killed in his dreams.  Are they past and future mirrors of the same man? Amoral enthusiasm for slaughter meets an internationalist voice of conscience. Everything about this silly fanon nonsense is wonderful. Brown is punished for his reluctance to kill; Pappadimos for his love of it; they complete one another. Fantastic. The more I speculate about this, the more excited I get. It WORKS I tell you.</p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><h3>Over to you, dear reader!</h3><p>Please join our cosy microfandom!</p>
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